1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to selective delivery of electronic communications, particularly preventing delivery of unwanted electronic communications, such as SPAM sent from a sender to a recipient. More particularly, the present invention relates to verifying a sender's address and/or electronic routing headers and delivering only those communications that are transmitted from an authentic source. A third party may accumulate information relating to a request from a recipient to unsubscribe from a source or type of electronic communications. The third party may use the accumulated information to take corrective action against senders who abuse requests of a recipient to unsubscribe.
2. Brief Description of the Art
The high cost of “Direct Mail” ($500 to $700 per 1,000 messages) compared to the relatively low cost of electronic mail (email) ($5 to $7 per 1,000 messages) as well as the faster turn-around time for email messages causes many solicitors to transmit unwanted and/or undesired emails to recipients. This unwanted and unsolicited email is a major problem for users of electronic mail systems and the Internet. Since the incremental cost of sending email messages is essentially zero to the sender, there is no incentive to temper distribution of information via email and/or the Internet. The recipient of these unwanted and unsolicited communications (spam) has no viable means to segregate or prevent the spam. (The term “spamming” is believed to have originated in a Monty Python comedy skit in which a waitress repeatedly offers a customer Spam, even though the customer repeatedly says that he does not want the canned meat product. In electronic transmissions, spamming relates to sending unsolicited email for commercial purposes over the Internet.)
Spam has become an arms race—as users learn to identify the unwanted email (e.g. message from junk.com), the mailers change their approach. It is often necessary for users to read every email message to determine which ones were unwanted as the mailers become more sophisticated in their selection of user name and message subject titles. Ultimately the burden becomes so severe that people must close their existing email accounts and move to a new account name that is not yet know to the spammers—and the pattern repeats. The users suffer because their legitimate correspondents are often the last to learn their new address.
While over a dozen states have passed laws against spam, there is no effective enforcement or practical way to control spam since the senders typically hide themselves and cannot be prosecuted. For many email users, the only solution to stop such spam is to close their email account and open a different account.
Many electronic communications, such as email messages, provide recipients with an option to unsubscribe to the communications (typically by providing text in the email and on webpages that instructs a recipient to “click” on an area to unsubscribe). This type of unsubscribe feature has at least two major drawbacks. The first drawback is that the recipient must read the message in some degree of detail to identify whether the communication has such an unsubscribe feature and then to access the feature. A second drawback is that a request to be removed from an electronic mailing list often backfires since it provides an indication that the electronic communication was actually read and that the recipient's email account is active. Thus, upon receipt of such requests, unscrupulous senders often increase the spam attacks rather than removing the recipient's name from an electronic mailing list. Furthermore, the very concept of “unsubscribe” is predicated upon the assumption that the user has previously “subscribed” to that mailing.
Conventional spam blocking approaches, such as blocking undesired addresses (user name level or domain level) are ineffective since many spammers change their mailing domain name as often as every few minutes (junk.com becomes fun.com next time, thus blocking junk.com does not solve the spam problem.)
Other conventional approaches, such as blocking undesired addresses and blocking undesired subjects, are offered by AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Eudora, and email filtering software. However, these systems are known to pass tremendous amounts of undesired spam and also to block desired mail. Furthermore, these systems are extremely susceptible to falsification by senders placing false information in the subject line and by using different words than those in the body of the message (e.g. use of synonyms for offensive words and the use of graphics).
What is needed to overcome drawbacks in the state of the art is a method and apparatus that permits recipients to receive desired electronic communications and block undesired electronic communications without reading the communication to determine that it is junk email, spam or other unwanted email. Recipients also need recourse against spammers.